Sex Trafficking in India - What I Learned From Survivors
This blog post was written by Liluye Guest Blog Post Writer, Aditi Chatterjee, an independent research and evaluation specialist. She works globally with diverse development stakeholders and focuses on participatory approaches for the domains of decent work and anti-human trafficking. She has extensive on-ground experience, particularly in India.
It was 2015, the first year of my work in the development sector in India, and I was standing in a red-light area in Mumbai for the first time. I was learning about different community-based models run by people who had lived experience of the problems they were trying to solve. On this particular day, I entered a brothel in the area with members of an NGO and a community-based organisation (CBO) working on health and social services for sex workers in the brothel.
As we entered the brothel, a female sex worker (let’s call her Jaya) approached the CBO representative to discuss some health support she needed. Introductions were made and after exchanging names, I asked her where she was from. She mentioned a district on the other side of the country, incidentally from the same state that I belonged to.
“Bangali?,” I smiled and asked, using the native language from our state of West Bengal in India.
Her eyes lit up immediately on hearing someone speak her language. “Tumi o? (You too?),” she asked. As I nodded, she did what every Bengali person does when a guest comes over and you settle in to have a chat. “Cha khabe? (Will you have some tea?),” she asked, swiftly taking out a 10 rupee note and sending a helper to fetch some tea from the stall at the foot of the building. Nothing in my college education, my corporate job, or my personal life had prepared me for the conversations I had next.
As we started to talk in our native tongue, I asked her how long she had lived in Mumbai. This seemingly innocuous question led her to open up about her past. At the age of 14, she had been brought from her village in West Bengal to the big metropolis of Mumbai by someone she knew who had promised her a job as a domestic worker. A steady income in the big city would help her contribute to the failing finances of her family back home, so it seemed like a good opportunity. That was until she was sold to the brothel upon reaching Mumbai.
This was the first time I was speaking to someone who had been trafficked. In all my naïve years before this particular moment, my understanding of sex work as a profession was based on one of the common cultural misconceptions that this was work undertaken by women who had run away from home to “earn some easy money.” At that time, though, I was wondering if someone could have helped her go back home. I soon learnt from her that restrictions on physical movement outside of the brothel only lasted for some time. Once she had been forced to take a client, her own shame and guilt was what held her back from going home. “Kon mukhe badi pherot jabo er por?,” she said. Loosely translated, she felt that she had done something so unspeakable that she couldn’t go back home with dignity anymore.
At this point, as a woman myself, I could only begin to imagine what it must have felt like for her to have suddenly lost her agency as well as the support of her family.
She mentioned that in due course of time, she fell in love with a client and got pregnant with his child. However, he accused her of carrying the child of another client and left her. She aborted the baby soon after.
By this time in our conversation we had both finished our tea and were joined by some of the other women in the brothel. She told them I was a Bengali and since they were, too, they immediately warmed up to me as we started to speak in our native language. One of them said she had teenage children who lived in a different city to whom she sent money from her earnings. She said, “I think they know what I do. How else would I be earning enough money living in Mumbai to send some home every month? I am not even literate. But they don’t ask me what I do because they know I will be ashamed to tell them.” She said she refuses to take clients who are too young. “Ami o toh Ma. (I am a mother after all.)”
As I was leaving the brothel with another colleague of mine after these very emotionally disturbing conversations, we both wondered why so many of the sex workers in that brothel were Bengalis from West Bengal. I found the answer to this question sometime later when I started working as a researcher in the anti-trafficking movement and went back to West Bengal.
I found out that Mumbai is one of the main “destinations” for sex trafficking, while some of the other states in the country, including West Bengal, are “sources.” Family poverty in the source villages, coupled with deceptive “big city” job offerings by middlemen is one of the main reasons why women and children, especially, are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation (CSE).
Public data on such cases is often unreliable, undermining the magnitude of the problem. Almost as an ironic call-back to my conversation with Jaya, I recall an interview with the anti-trafficking unit of a source district, during which the officer said that trafficking is not a big problem in the area. “If a girl runs away from her house with a boy to go live elsewhere, we can’t log a case of trafficking, can we?,” she said.
Understanding these complexities associated with sex trafficking can be useful for government, funders, NGOs, and other allies to co-create interventions with survivors to address the issue. Hopefully then other women like Jaya won’t be trafficked to brothels and those who want to come back home will have a better life to look forward to.
While there are no easy solutions, I gathered from the collective intelligence of anti-trafficking NGOs and trafficking survivors in source areas that prevention and rehabilitation interventions can be particularly impactful in addressing some of the root causes of CSE, and improving the lives of survivors.
Preventative measures like delivering awareness sessions for children, youth, and families by CSOs in high-risk source areas can be particularly helpful. These sessions make them aware of deceptive practices used by known and unknown middlemen. This can help individuals and communities spot red flags when livelihood or migration opportunities are presented without any concrete details of the “jobs” or even so much as an employer contact detail at the destination.
For those who have been trafficked and rescued, rehabilitation opportunities in the form of mental health support and livelihoods can be especially useful. The latter definitely needs to be done with local social contexts in mind. During some research work with a source-side NGO, I came across technology-enabled data entry roles that survivors had been trained in, for which they came to the NGO’s community office for a fixed time period every day. One of the NGO staff mentioned that they understood from the community how important a trusted work location and a fixed time of work was, both for the survivors and their families. Any uncertainty about their whereabouts would not just be traumatic for them again, but also lead to “gossip among the neighbours” about where the women were going every day in the name of work. The stigma that Jaya had feared was clearly visible in the source locations.
As I was wrapping up my field work in the source district, I had a lunch-time conversation with a survivor from one of the NGO’s rehabilitation programs that will stay with me forever. We talked about a public garden near her house that she liked to visit. She said it was a very isolated place without anyone around and she liked that people left her alone there without being intrusive or asking questions about where she had been last year. I am not someone who is very comfortable with isolated spots, and I immediately asked out of concern if it was a safe place to visit alone. “The worst thing that could happen to me already happened last year. What else do I have to be scared of?,” was her haunting reply.